I first met Robin Williams in 1978 after midnight in a smoky Toronto club where he was high on cocaine and even higher on genius comedy. In his first Canadian interview, at three in the morning after a mesmerizing, two-hour, improvised standup show at Mark Breslin’s original Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club, Williams enthused about his future on the Mork & Mindy TV series.

I last met Robin Williams more recently, when he had just got out of rehab (again), this time for alcohol abuse stemming from a lifetime of clinical depression. When I expressed my personal happiness in seeing him well again, Williams embraced me in a big, warm, fuzzy and brotherly bear hug. Williams was always an emotional guy. So am I. Call it a bromance.

In between those two meetings were a dozen or more other interviews, all memorable for their electrical charge — one time quite literally. I fondly remember a session during which I garbled up a question, blaming it on jet-lag. Williams placed the palm of his hand on my forehead and pretended to send in 100,000 volts. He was Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster, complete with sound effects. Play along and Williams would love it: So I writhed like I was being electrocuted. Then I righted myself, re-gained my tongue and asked a perfectly phrased question. Williams grinned happily. Mission accomplished.

It was a perfect example of his sense of humour: Explosive, inventive, intelligent, in the moment. He revealed that rare ability when he was still an unknown on stage at Yuk Yuk’s in 1978, careening wildly between the sacred (Shakespearean references) to the profane (waving the mic stand over the audience while shouting: “Fishing for a--holes!”). Williams’ brain housed 1001 compartments, each filled to overflow with ideas, observations, arcane facts and penetrating insights. He could open another brain-box a millisecond after closing another. His genius was instantaneous.

But he clearly was a complex man. A minor example popped up during a 1999 group interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Jacob the Liar on the TIFF menu. Another journalist asked Williams to fess up on being a liar in real life. In a bittersweet moment, Williams said he would have to exclude his personal situation, as he knew that we knew that he had divorced his first wife to marry his son’s now pregnant nanny (whom he later divorced before marrying a third time).

So the most troublesome public lie he ever told, Williams said, was mentioning his birthplace as Scotland in an early interview. When he would later deny it (because he was born in Chicago and raised in the Detroit area), Scots would accuse him of renouncing his heritage. So that 1978 lie was an ongoing irritation of his own doing, he said. Damn you, Robin! That was me you lied to in that 1978 session in Toronto! Williams apologized, chortling about the incident. His apology became the news of the moment.

In addition to face time, there was entertainment time spent watching him develop as a comedy king and simultaneously as an accomplished and enormously underrated actor. His best onscreen work was bursting with pathos and mournful feelings that could stir the soul as he bared his in his “lesser” films, most of which did not create buzz at the box office. These were counterpoint to hits such as Good Morning, Vietnam, Hook, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting and so on. And counterpoint to his failures such as Bicentennial Man, Death to Smoochy, Man of the Year and others. Instead, we are talking about off-kilter films such The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson, Seize the Day, Awakenings, Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King, What Dreams May Come, Insomnia, One Hour Photo, August Rush and The Face of Love.

The face of depression could often be seen in these films, stark and clear, especially with the hindsight we now have because Williams is dead from an apparent suicide. He seemed to take so little lasting pleasure for himself and yet he gave so much pleasure to millions of others. Including the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, who elegantly paid tribute to Williams on Monday after his death was announced, not as one of those annoying on-line hoaxes but as a real-life tragedy with enormous consequences.

“I lost my husband and my best friend while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings,” Williams’ widow Susan Schneider said Monday. “I am utterly heartbroken.”

For obvious reasons, because my relationship with Williams was casual and professional, I cannot claim the same emotional territory as Schneider. But I am utterly heartbroken as well. Life on Planet Earth now seems soured and spoiled.